Community media, their communities and conflict: A mapping analysis of Israeli community broadcasting groups Hillel Nossek* Kinneret Academic College, Israel Nico Carpentier* Charles University, Czech Republic Abstract Community media organisations are famously difficult to define, as this media field is highly elusive and diverse, even if there is a certain degree of consensus about a series of basic characteristics. One key defining component is the objective to serve its community by allowing its members to participate in self-representational processes. Yet this component raises questions about what ‘community’ means, and how the community that is being served relates to other parts of society. This article studies a particular social reality – Israel – where community television is the dominant model, community television production groups are separated from the actual distribution of the produced content and different configurations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ characterise political reality. Following the methodological procedures outlined in Voniati et al. (2018), a mapping of 83 Israeli community broadcasting groups was organised, allowing us to flesh out the different ways in which these community broadcasting groups deal with their community/ies and the ‘other’. The analysis shows that many of these Israeli community broadcasting groups have fairly closed, singular-community articulations of ‘their’ communities. They rarely engage in interactions with other communities (limiting internal diversity) and their external diversity is even more restricted, with only one Arab–Israeli community broadcasting group able to be identified. The analysis did, however, identify a dozen groups with more open approaches towards their outer worlds, and thus the potential to assume a more conflict-transformatory role. Keywords Agonism, collaboration, community television, Israel, mapping analysis, multi-voice, peace-building Introduction Community media organisations are famously difficult to define, as this media field is highly elusive and diverse. In the academic work on community media, several approaches to defining community media exist, as Carpentier, Servaes & Lie (2003) argue (see also Bailey, Cammaerts & Carpentier, 2007). At the same time, a certain degree of consensus exists about a series of basic characteristics. Community media are frequently, and for good reason, seen as organisations that _______________________________________ Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] 2 Journal of Alternative and Community Media, vol. 4(2) (2019) allow the democratic to be translated into everyday life. As civil society organisations, they are locations where internal participatory-democratic cultures and horizontal decision-making structures are realised. As media organisations, in contrast to commercial and public broadcasters, they allow communities to participate in self-representational processes. These characteristics are nicely captured by Tabing’s (2002: 9) definition of a community radio station as ‘one that is operated in the community, for the community, about the community and by the community’. Of course, care should be taken not to romanticise community media organisations as participatory heavens, as they do not always live up to the expectations that are created by these definitions and the ideological ambitions embedded within them. In this article, we want to confront these definitions and approaches with a particular social reality, namely that of Israel, where community television is the dominant model, and where community television production groups 1 are separated from the actual distribution of the produced content. This unavoidably also means that we need to bring in the specificity of the Israeli political context, characterised by a series of long-term, international and internal, ethno- cultural conflicts (Galnoor & Blander, 2018). In particular, within this context of (violent) conflict, we are interested in how the communities of Israeli community media are defined, and how Israel’s community media position themselves within these (violent) conflicts that haunt the region. In order to generate answers to these questions, we organised a mapping of 83 Israeli community broadcasting groups. Even if this mapping has occurred at the expense of analytical depth, the overview it generates allows us to flesh out the different ways in which these community broadcasting groups deal with the different configurations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that characterise the Israeli political reality. Articulating communities and rhizomes As we mentioned in the introduction, community media are elusive organisations, characterised by participatory practices that aim to serve ‘the’ community. Tabing’s (2002: 9) community radio definition provides an indication of this focus on community service, but it also becomes visible in, for instance, the 2008 European Parliament’s Resolution on Community Media in Europe,2 which states that ‘community media are non-profit organisations accountable to the community that they seek to serve’. Another example is the ‘working definition’ of community radio adopted by AMARC-Europe, the European branch of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters,3 an organisation that encompasses a wide range of community radio practices globally. Attempting to avoid a prescriptive definition (and focusing on radio), AMARC-Europe (1994: 4) labelled a community radio station as ‘a “non-profit” station, currently broadcasting, which offers a service to the community in which it is located, or to which it broadcasts, while promoting the participation of this community in the radio’. In unpacking the serving-the-community component of the community media identity, two elements are significant. The first is the complexity of the notion of community itself. Often, community is defined in relation to geography and ethnicity as structuring notions of collective identity or group relations (Leunissen, 1986). This is also related to community media organisations and how they aim to give voice to people affiliated with particular localities and ethnicities. For instance, ethnic broadcasts are an intrinsic aspect of community media, and many organisations have slots for different ethnic groups, which produce relevant content (Barker, 1999; Langer, 2001; McKelvey, 2007). Nevertheless, other types of relationships 4 between media organisations and their communities are implied in the way the phrasing of AMARC-Europe’s definition continues, with the words ‘to which it broadcasts’ added. This is aligned with two reconceptualisations of the traditional (geography and/or ethnicity-based) approach towards community. The first reconceptualisation introduces the non-geographical as a complement to the structural-geographic approach to community. In particular, the concept of the community of Nossek and Carpentier: Community media, their communities and conflict 3 interest (Newman, 1980) enables emphasising the importance of other factors in structuring a community. A second set of reconceptualisations is based on the cultural as a complement to the structural-geographic community approach. These approaches emphasise the subjective construction of community, as illustrated by Lindlof’s (1988) concept of interpretative community and Cohen’s (1989) community of meaning. Moreover, communities are not stable entities. Tönnies’ (1963) romantic perspective on the community should not render us blind to the many discursive and material conflicts that are a constitutive part of these very same communities, including the discursive struggles over the meanings of communities and the material struggles over memberships, territories and frontiers, within the communities, as well as in relation to their outside worlds. As Barrett (2015: 194) puts it: ‘Communities are contested spaces’, characterised by a ‘solidarity-exclusion dialectic’. Second, the use of the community concept in its singular form is deceitful, as community media are a crossroads of a multiplicity of communities. For instance, Santana and Carpentier (2010) explore the wide variety of activist, ethnic-linguistic, subcultural and art communities that are being served by two Belgian community/alternative radio stations. Community media organisations act as nodal points in a wide network of communities, (civil society) organisations and individual people, bringing them into the organisation in varying degrees of interaction and involvement. This also implies that community media producers do not necessarily all identify with the very same community, but have established very different identifications with different communities (and the identities they incorporate). This is further complicated, as Rock (2005: 96) points out in a discussion of communities of practice, by the lack of unidirectional relations between an individual and a community: ‘each individual simultaneously inhabits different communities’. The community media responses to these contingencies are equally diverse: in some cases, the transgressions of ‘the’ community are celebrated and the multiplicity of communities are agonistically embraced, while in other cases the community media organisation withdraws into isolationism (Mattelart & Piemme, 1983: 416) or engages in internal or external antagonisms (Dunaway, 2005). Community media and (violent) conflict The role of community media organisations in the context of violent conflict has hardly been discussed, although a few exceptions, such as